"There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old.

Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or a thousand, to be an unusual span.

There are, for example, less than ten thousand "humanoid individuals" alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear

There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis (The first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, and they came later).

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards. (There were a few, fossil records are unreliable. Several of them lasted for millions of years).

There are roughly seventy people walking the earth, human to all appearances (and in a few cases, to all medical tests currently available), who were alive before the earth had begun to congeal from gas and dust.

How well do you know your neighbors? Your friends? Your lovers?

Walk the streets of any city, and stare carefully a -t the people who pass you, and wonder, and know this:

They are there too. The old ones."


As Peter Straub interprets Neil Gaiman's words above in his afterword for "Brief Lives":

"Not too many of these interesting folk are left, which is why we get the elegiac repetition of "less than," but we might respond that we wouldn't mind lives in which brevity is defined on such a scale."


Well, I think one of those few left is my fiancé. (: